Michigan Coach Dusty May Breaks Down Illinois' Rebounding Dominance

For nearly the first three months of the college basketball season, Illinois (19-11, 11-8 Big Ten) led not only the Big Ten but the entire country in rebounding margin per game. 

But after losing freshman big Morez Johnson Jr. (one of the NCAA's top 15 rebounders per 40 minutes) to a broken wrist, the Illini immediately faltered on the glass, coming up short in the battle of the boards in their first three outings without Johnson.

Traveling north to Ann Arbor for a matchup with a stellar rebounding squad in No. 15 Michigan (22-7, 14-4), led by its pair of 7-footers Danny Wolf and Vladislav Goldin, the Illini appeared to be facing an uphill battle to buck that rebounding trend.

Instead, Illinois blitzed the home team on the glass, outrebounding Michigan 43-32 and snatching 19 offensive rebounds to the Wolverines' 20 defensive rebounds. In other words, each time the Illini missed a shot, they basically tracked down the miss as often as the Wolverines did.

After his club fell by a final score of 93-73, Michigan head coach Dusty May explained after the game exactly how he saw the rebounding battle playing out:

“We were broken down because we were late on our switches, and they did a nice job of confusing the switches," May said, "but ... we weren’t able to keep bodies on bodies early, and then we had to go to the zone.”

And not only did the Wolverines’ defensive scheme – especially the zone – make it harder to find and block out those Illini bodies, Illinois frequently managed to come down with the rebound even when UM did all the right things.

May attributed at least some of that development to what coach Brad Underwood like to call Illinois' positional size: 7-foot-1 center Tomislav Ivisic, 6-foot-9 forward Ben Humrichous, 6-foot-8 forward Will Riley, 6-foot-7 Tre White and 6-foot-6 point guard Kasparas Jakucionis. Even 6-foot-2 Kylan Boswell, despite his height, is a hulking, glass-crashing demon.

“When you look at their lineup – Will Riley, Ivisic, Boswell plays much bigger than his height, Tre White’s a big kid, Jakucionis is big, Humrichous –  they’re big, strong, physical guys, and in a jump ball contest, 15 feet to 18 feet, they won it seemed like all of them,” said May.

And while the Illini may not have won all of those 50-50 balls, they certainly won a large majority of them, which ultimately proved to be the difference-maker as the visitors scored a mind-boggling 30 second-chance points.